[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation switching to Google Apps?

[David Gerard]

On 26 October 2010 23:35, Zugravu Gheorghe <zugravu.gheorghe at gmail.com> wrote:

> And as a small comment: Thunderbird is free (as in freedom) application
> and allows to do whatever manipulation with the code (and there are a
> bunch of thunderbird customization already available there) - thus if
> there is a need this need can solved by the community. - And Wikimedia
> could make a call for improvements in the code of TB, which I believe
> would have be taken into consideration by the developers. And more
> people could have used the results of that - thus generating a better
> and smoother application (as in the wikipedia articles).


It is indeed theoretically possible to make Thunderbird as good as
Gmail and Google Calendar. In practice, no-one's managed to do so in
six years, despite quite a lot of effort. This suggests that although
possible, it may not in fact be feasible.

The necessary condition for a move to Thunderbird instead would be an
existence proof, i.e. a build that is as useful a tool as the Google
tools. Which, note, are not even proper applications, but browser
pages.


- d.